MEN OR MACHINES? THE VALUE OF LIFE AND THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY IN CULTURE, THE
COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA AND FILMS IN THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

Pontifical University of Saint Thomas, Rome

3 December 2001

Paul Cardinal POUPARD

President of the
Pontifical Council for Culture

I am very happy to be with you
for the opening of the fifth Tertio Millennio Film Festival. This has
become a regular event in the life of the Pontifical Council for Culture, the
Pontifical Council for Social Communications and the “Ente dello Spettacolo”,
but I know it is one that is becoming better known both within and without the
Catholic world, and that is because observers have appreciated the value of the
project and the results it has produced so far. Clearly films are an excellent
vehicle for the discussion of beliefs and values in a way that is not
threatening and can, therefore, elicit deep thought and frank, open
conversation. They are non-didactic, and yet extremely provocative, in the best
sense. I hope and am sure that this year’s festival will take us further forward
in a debate our world urgently needs.

I am struck by a certain complexity in the title of this
year’s Festival. The question guiding all we shall do in these days indicates
what looks to me like an exclusive distinction. One cannot be both man and
machine. But perhaps the question also suggests that some people think one can.
The second part of the Festival’s title is an invitation to reflect on the
advantages and disadvantages of technological progress, on whether or not it
improves the physical, economic, social and moral conditions of human life.
Technology is one of the major influences shaping contemporary culture. That is
something we should try to understand rather than resist. But in these days I am
sure many will point to some of the risks and challenges technological progress
brings with it. Two of the elements that have most benefited from new technology
are the communications media and the film industry. But they are both in a
position to use new skills and methods in a way that will imbue our culture with
a healthy view of human life.

When people look back to the year 2001, the thing that will
strike them most clearly is a set of terrible images imprinted on the minds of
every person in the world who has access to television or newspapers: the attack
by terrorists on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in
Washington on 11 September. This is not the place to enumerate or dwell on the
particular images, which will have struck us all in different ways, but what
is significant is that this event shocked more people more quickly and more
profoundly than any previous event. This happened precisely because those images
were beamed live around the world, and the people who saw them will probably
never forget them. If ever anyone was in doubt, this is proof positive of the
stunning power of visual images.

Precisely why did these images shock people? The
question is not superfluous in our context. What was appalling was not the
destruction of buildings and property – objects that could possibly one day be
replaced. It was not even the offence to a proud nation, or the hatred for what
the buildings represented, although those factors both raise serious issues that
need to be faced and pondered. The real source of sadness, grief, horror and
rage is the cost in terms of human lives. This brings us right to the heart of
our film festival this year – the value of human life. What is human life
worth? How much value do our cultures place on human life? How much value do we,
as individuals, place on human life? In the next few minutes, I hope to sketch a
framework for our considerations that may help order our thoughts and suggest
new images of humanity to be communicated creatively in the new technologies
and, above all, in films.

I. Images of men and machines in
film and modern literature

Some powerful images in films bring to the screen the visions
of life in the future found in modern literature. These images may look dated
very soon after we first see them, but they are no less striking for that. The
test is whether we remember them. I am sure many of you will have a very vivid
picture of a futuristic city in your mind’s eye when I mention the film
Metropolis, which Fritz Lang made exactly seventy-five years ago. Even those
of us who never saw the film the first time around will recognise the images,
not least because it was used to great effect as the video backdrop to a song
recorded some fifteen years ago by the English rock group Queen. The
vision in Metropolis is typical of cartoon adventure stories written for
young boys throughout much of the twentieth century. It is a vision of wonder, a
projection of people’s hope that life in the technologically advanced city of
the future would be so much better than the present. Many of the first
commercial advertisements in the early days of television portrayed the same
conviction. The best examples were those that told housewives that domestic
appliances would set them free to enjoy much more leisure. They implied that an
automated household would be a happier one. Smiling children and contented young
couples are still de rigueur in today’s television commercials. In this
positive vision, men and machines work hand in hand for what is clearly seen to
be a better life in the immediate future.

Not all visions of the future are so positive or utopian. A
name that is well known from films is Frankenstein. Indeed, there have
been dozens of films made since 1910 using that name in the title, the most
famous being the 1931 Hollywood version starring Boris Karloff, and the comic
spin-off Young Frankenstein, made by Mel Brooks in 1974. Most people
think of Frankenstein as the monster portrayed in the films, but in the novel
written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1818[1]
the name belongs to the Swiss scientist whose creation eventually killed him.
After thirteen years of reactions to the book when it first appeared, she
referred to it in her introduction to the second edition as her “hideous
progeny”. The monster Frankenstein created is fierce and extremely destructive.
But what is hideous is that the real location of evil is in Victor
Frankenstein’s way of thinking. “I succeeded in discovering the cause of
generation and life”, he said; “I became myself capable of bestowing animation
upon lifeless matter”. This is very much the stuff of what we might now call
science fiction. But Victor’s further thoughts are chilling. “No one can
conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards…. A new species would
bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe
their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child as
completely as I should deserve theirs”[2].

For Mary Shelley, technological inventiveness can obviously
have frightening consequences. Here it is a question of self-centred research
and development. Victor Frankenstein certainly sought power and gratification.
The novel raises a further question that arises in many other contexts. To what
extent can technology run out of the control of its inventors or operators?

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932,
offered a chilling view of how things might be in a technological utopia. The
historical background is significant: the Soviet empire was very firmly
established, and the Nazis were emerging from the wings elsewhere. What Huxley
wrote was not really a utopia, but much more a dystopia, the
analysis of a humanly dysfunctional world where inhuman or monstrous forces have
been let loose. Brave New World belongs to a new literary genre created
several years earlier by the Russian writer and novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin. In
We[3],
Zamyatin portrayed life in the “Single State”, where workers lived in glass
houses so that every moment of their lives could be observed. They were referred
to by numbers rather than names, and dressed in identical uniforms. Chemical
food and human contact were strictly rationed. The State was ruled by “the
Benefactor”, who was unanimously and perpetually re-elected. The abiding image
after reading this novel is of a denial of personal worth and the oppressive
presence of constant technological surveillance. These images are even starker
and developed further in George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949 and made
into a film at least twice[4].
The appeal of Huxley’s, Zamyatin’s and Orwell’s dystopian novels is that
they strike a chord in people’s imagination. They each create images of a
society where human life is hemmed in by technology that allows the totalitarian
government to be omnipresent and, consequently, almost omniscient. If knowledge
really is power, this makes the political controllers practically omnipotent as
well. Here, individuality and initiative are perceived as the enemy of the
state, and their elimination results in a very efficient, but inhuman,
organisation of society. These novels reflect perfectly the experience of people
subjected to the highly mechanised life of modern industry. Here was a warning
of what could happen, not only in socialist states, but also in societies
dominated by a technological approach to everything, including human life. Once
appreciated, these images are hard to forget.

II. Men and machines and high technology

It has been said that the twenty-first century will be the
century of biotechnology, and recent news serves to confirm that. It will, in
fact, force us all to ask what place human life will have in our culture. Very
recently, a laboratory in the United States of America claimed to have cloned
human stem cells. If this were true, such an example of the ability and
ingenuity of the scientific community would make us stand back in awe. But it
seems that the company in question has actually failed to achieve what it
claims. In any case, there is no mention of an earlier episode of cloning in
December 1998, in Seoul in South Korea. It is clear that the current news is
meant to jolt people into awareness of the issue, so that there will be greater
public sympathy for a forthcoming attempt to pass legislation permitting human
cloning. What is important is the way the subject is presented, the images used.
Much is made of the term “therapeutic” cloning, on the pretext that human cells
can be used to improve other people’s health. Very few people mention the
serious problems involved; perhaps it is really a question of marketing an idea,
and the packaging has to be totally positive. It is as if one were forbidden to
draw people’s attention to anything that would question the value of the
process. I must admit that my own reflections on the human person always begin
from those beautiful lines in Psalm 8: “what is man that you bear him in
mind; mortal man, that you care for him? Yet you have made him little less than
a god; with glory and honour you crowned him” (v. 4f.). In other words, the
human person is a remarkable element in God’s creation; as Christians, we cannot
go as far as some tendencies within the broad sweep of New Age, but this
Psalm clearly shows just how precious we are to our Creator. That means we have
to be very careful before we interfere with the way we have been created, just
as we are meant to be good stewards of all the Lord created. As the Holy Father
said in his Apostolic Letter marking the end of the Great Jubilee of the year
two thousand, “those using the latest advances of science, especially in
the field of biotechnology, must never disregard fundamental ethical
requirements by invoking a questionable solidarity which eventually leads to
discrimination between one life and another and ignoring the dignity which
belongs to every human being” (Novo Millennio Ineunte, 51).

The issue of cloning reminds any thinking person that it is
always essential to probe behind the images that often satisfy our culture. If
we fail to do that, we can be prevented from seeing the truth of the issue. In
the case of the value of human life, there is a great deal at stake if we simply
give the go-ahead to whatever is technically possible, without subjecting it to
the same ethical scrutiny that applies to all our actions. To paraphrase the
Lord’s question in humbler words, is man at the service of technology or is
technology at the service of man?

Another closely related issue worth bearing in mind during
these days is one that links technology, the communications media, the film
industry and culture. It is the question of high technology weaponry and war. I
mention this because it is lurking beneath much that we see or hear on
television or radio news programmes, or read in newspapers and periodicals. Ever
since the Vietnam war, it has been possible to watch military operations live –
previously something re-enacted in films and described in written accounts.
Since the conflicts in the Persian Gulf, high technology has made it possible to
follow the progress of a “smart” laser-guided bomb right to its target. Not long
ago, this would have seemed bizarre. Now, I wonder how far we can become de-sensitised
by over-exposure to such a frightening, violent occurrence. Again, technology
has progressed to such a point that those who destroy even large numbers of
people defined as their “enemy” have no need to see them. To help them cope with
what they are doing, they are drilled into referring to those they kill with a
clinical terminology that means they never have to call them “people”. I think
that the “image masters” of the third Millennium have a great responsibility: in
the way the press and television and radio report war, in the way films deal
with it, and in the way video games are designed with young users in mind. The
question must always be there: what value do these images give to human life?

High technology is not only in pharmaceutical laboratories
and on battlefields; it is in every home in the Western world, and more and more
in other parts of the world, too. Many of us remember the beginnings of
television, and how invasive it seemed to be when we got over the novelty of it.
Nowadays, we are faced with something much more advanced, and harder to control.
I am speaking, of course, of the Internet. I feel obliged to stress the
good it can do. I am very happy, for example, that the work of the Pontifical
Council for Culture has been made much more accessible by means of a web page on
the Holy See’s Internet site. I know that, in remote parts of large countries,
education has been vastly improved. People can discover the riches of a library
without even having to be in the same country. This remarkable means of
communication has brought so many good things to so many people. Indeed, with
such a powerful tool, those in the Church who are responsible for evangelisation
must ask: “How can we not be present and use information networks, whose screens
are at the heart of people’s homes, to implant the values of the Gospel there?”[5]

But these are not the only values the Internet brings with
it. For it has to be acknowledged that the Internet has been the way pornography
has invaded homes, schools and libraries. At
the same time, this new technology did notcreate the
abusers who use it for evil
purposes; it simply gave them theopportunity[6].
Most people can fend for themselves when they are faced with wickedness and
temptation. But I cannot see how purveyors of pornography,racism and other potentially offensive
materials fail to see their responsibility towards children who may
discover these things either accidentally or because some perverted person has
led them to it. It may be harder for people to see that we also have a
responsibility to help steer morally weak adults away from what are rightly
known in a Christian context as “occasions of sin”.

Another question about Internet is its effect on privacy.
There is a great deal of information about ordinary people available to
unscrupulous companies, who are already able to compile phenomenally detailed
dossiers on the “browsing habits” of almost all Internet users. It is also clear
that some governments are reluctant to pass legislation to restrict the
availability and use of personal data[7].
I am not suggesting any kind of paranoid crusade for secrecy. But I would ask,
quite simply, what the value of human life seems to be when people are clearly
made so vulnerable by a stealthy but effective use of sophisticated
technologies.

III. Machines for Men. Humanising Technology

I am firmly convinced that there is no inner contradiction
between the viewpoint of any scientist and that of men and women who believe in
God. Those who say there is a conflict between religion and science are
rehearsing a tired and unconvincing litany of inaccuracies. The present Pope has
always made it clear that “the Church freely recognizes… that it has benefited
from science”. He also believes that “collaboration between religion and modern
science is to the advantage of both, and in no way violates the autonomy of
either”[8],
a principle that is at the heart of the Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio.
It is worth remembering that the Pope told everyone who took part in the Jubilee
of Men and Women from the World of Learning, in May 2000, that “the Church is
not afraid of science”. I, too, wish to emphasise that technology is not my
enemy.

In his essay The Question concerning Technology[9],
Heidegger recommends a calm approach to technology, so that we are free to see
it, as it were, from within. It is not enough to understand technology in the
sense of seeing how it works. It is more important to discover what
technology means. One cannot assess technology’s effects on culture
without this ability to step outside the immediate experience of it. I should
like to say, with Heidegger, that “what is dangerous is not technology.
Technology is not demonic; but its essence is mysterious…. The threat to man
does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and
apparatus of technology”[10].
For Heidegger, the problem with technology is that it can and does
fascinate or entrance us. This can obscure the fact that there are more
fundamental questions to ask. But, as long as we realise that is happening, we
still have a chance of disentangling the positive and negative elements of
technology. Towards the end of his essay, Heidegger speaks of the “time when it
was not technology alone that bore the name technē…. Once there was a
time when the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful was called technē.
The poiēsis of the fine arts was also called technē”[11].
I think this gives a richer and deeper appreciation of the scope of technology.
When it is not and end in itself, it can help to make beauty more accessible to
the men and women of our time, who are “hesitant before the true, resistant to
the good, but captivated by the beautiful”[12].

I hesitate to endorse Heidegger’s position totally, because
there is a risk in his approach of instrumentalising the other rather
than respecting his or her absolute alterity. Technology is the most
sophisticated and the most effective form of mastering objects or even
conquering the earth[13].
Since the days of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the natural human urge or
libido dominandi, to use the phrase coined by Emmanuel Levinas, has been
expressed above all in our desire to dominate reality by knowing it. The very
word concept speaks of grasping and, in some sense, possessing what it
can know. In the case of relations with other human beings, there is clear
evidence that many of our relationships are coloured by this unconscious
tendency to want to dominate or even possess the other. For Levinas this is a
relationship doomed to failure. “If one could possess, grasp, and know the
other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of
power”[14].
The other person’s alterity has to be totally respected, even if his or her
presence is an “irruption” into my life. “The relationship with the other is not
an idyllic and harmonious relationship of communion, or a sympathy through which
we put ourselves in the other’s place…; the relationship with the other is a
relationship with a Mystery”[15].
Levinas goes even further. He says that the respect owed to the other implies
that we have to give him or her a real priority over us. Here is the total
opposite to the manipulative view of external reality underlying the normal use
of technology, one that becomes frightening in the examples I used to illustrate
where technology can undervalue or even devalue human life.

Conclusion. The “Image Masters” at the service of humankind

I wish to conclude with a challenge to all of us, but
specifically to those involved in the art of film-making. I have suggested that
we underestimate the power of images at our peril. Some images from films,
literature and the communications media really do not depict the human person as
the superb creation of God that is worthy of dignity and respect. In many ways,
the way technology is used has allowed men and women to feel helpless and
worthless in the face of a progress they cannot resist or stop. The problem is
not the sophistication of technology itself, but the attitudes of those who
control it. What can we do about that? What must we do about it? I
suggest that the power of images is the key. What image do we ourselves have of
human life? Do we in reality view others as people we would somehow like to
control? Or do we have a hint of that enormous respect for the Mystery of the
Other that is at the heart of the vision Levinas had? Everything hinges on our
own answers to these questions.

Would it be too much to ask the most creative artists we have
in the world of social communications and, above all, in the world of films, to
seek to view the world and the human person sub specie aeternitatis? Too
often people have attempted to prove that the world is too small for God and
humanity to co-exist, but there is an alternative way of portraying that
relationship. God does not despise his world; He loves everything in it and
rejoices in it, and that means that He loves human beings and rejoices in them.
Despite all the human race’s failures and weaknesses, I feel we are called to
try to imagine, and to put into images, what God sees in us. And you know as
well as I do that we have the technology. Now above all the world needs
signs of hope. I have every confidence that film-makers can answer that need.

[3]
Zamyatin was not allowed to publish this novel in Russia, where it was
circulated in manuscript form. The first publication was in English in the
United States of America in 1924, and it was first published in Russian in
Prague in 1927.

On 12th June 2002, Cardinal
Paul POUPARD paid a visit to Raicinema in Rome. In a talk entitled
Dreams of a future of beauty and peace, he stressed that, since its
beginnings, the world of the cinema has had close and important links with the
religious dimension of the human person. The Church opens her arms to people
from this world, makes them welcome, enters into dialogue with them in the field
of culture and art, listens, observes and offers suggestions. In recent years,
the Pontifical Council for Culture has tirelessly repeated this message and
lived up to it.

On 17th June 2002,
Father Laurent Mazas, f.s.j., of the Pontifical
Council for Culture, represented the Holy See at a meeting of the New Committee
for Culture at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. In his talk on the
Promotion of the cultural identity of Europe : the challenge of education,
he brought out the importance of basing educational programmes on a correct
understanding of the human person and creating the
conditions necessary for handing on Europe’s common heritage. Educational
methods must also make room for a correct and fair presentation of religions.

Young priests from the five
dioceses in the French-speaking region of the Pacific Bishops’ Conference (C.E.PAC.)
– New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands –
compiled and adopted a Missionary Creed that echoed several points
in the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in Oceania.